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Chris Lavergne

4,407 Quotes
President of Thought.is
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4,407 quotes curated by Chris Lavergne:

“When we know something well, we don't realize how abstractly we think about it. And we forget that other people, who have lived their own lives, have not gone through our idiosyncratic histories of abstractification.”
— Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
Tagged: Abstractification, Curse of Knowledge, Personal History
“The main thing I've been trying to communicate, whether it's in terms of spirituality, in terms of media, in terms of marketing and communications, or even in terms of politics and economics, is that there's one thing going on here: people are desperately afraid to accept the fact that we are moving towards a very organismic relationship with one another: that the human being is one big thing. The problem about accepting that is if the human being is one thing, if we're all part of the same big organism, then those people starving in Africa or India are not them, they're us. So all of a sudden it's not their pain, it's our pain and we're all responsible for what's happening here. And I think the real obstacle to that kind of a sensibility is not that people want to control what's happening or that people want to be bosses, but that people are really afraid of that level of intimacy.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Disinformation: The Interviews: Uncut & Uncensored
Tagged: Connectionism, Global Brain, Intimacy, One Body, Pain, Relationalism, My Philosophy, Thought Catalog History
“There's nobody there. There's nobody in charge. All a large corporation is is a set of commands . It's like a very simple computer program and if you look at what that program is, you can hack it to do whatever you damn well please because there's nobody in charge. Nobody understands. I mean that's the beauty of it. Everyone's upset about these giant media conglomerates, you know, with Viacom buying MTV and buying Paramount or AOL buying Time Warner. The bigger these machines get, the smaller their little brains are in comparison with the whole thing. It's a giant media company that allows something like Beavis and Butthead or gangster rap to happen. And so I really take delight in how stupid corporations are.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Disinformation: The Interviews: Uncut & Uncensored
Tagged: Corporations, Media Conglomerates, Money
“I've always looked at media as something I call social currency, in other words: people don't buy records in order to have the record, just in order to have that music; people buy records in order to have an excuse for someone else to come over to their house and visit them. People watch a movie so that they can talk to their friends who have also seen that same movie. It's not the experience of the media itself as much as the way that that media can act as social currency for other interactions. Where it gets dangerous is when we're just consuming media and have no time to actually relate about it.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Disinformation: The Interviews: Uncut & Uncensored
Tagged: Media, Movies, Relations, Social Currency, Thought Catalog
“The human species is undergoing radical change. The Internet is almost a test run for this change. I don't think the Internet, in this sense, is such a major deal at all. The Internet is a way to practice what it is that we're going to have to do for real, which is deal with privacy when we can all read each other's thoughts, deal with a global community when we're all realizing that we're part of the same thing. The Internet is like a good, dry, safe way for scared white people to experience community again, after we've been so isolated through television.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Disinformation: The Interviews: Uncut & Uncensored
Tagged: Internet, Isolation, Radical Change, Technological Time, Television
“Science itself is one of the major conformity enforcing areas. There are dogmas in science that are held to as if they were religions and people who say things that are against those dogmas are cast out just as viciously as they are from any other subculture. We've got to get beyond that, we've got to get to the point where the outriders, where the eccentrics, where the people who come up with the really wacky ideas that turn out to be the ideas of the future are allowed into the establishment, and are incorporated much more quickly than they've been incorporated in the past.”
— Howard Bloom, Disinformation: The Interviews: Uncut & Uncensored
Tagged: Conformity, Diversity Generators, Dogma, Marginalization, Science, Think Different
“Well the global brain is not something that's electronic and it has nothing to do with the World Wide Web and it has nothing to do with the Internet; we were World Wide Webbed and Internetted 3.5 billion years ago when life first began.”
— Howard Bloom, Disinformation: The Interviews: Uncut & Uncensored
Tagged: Connection, Connectionism, Data, Electronic, Global Brain, Internet, Relationalism
“With all of our Internetting, with all of our World Wide Webbing, with all of our URLs, we're still not anywhere near being able to swap the quantities of information that bacteria were able to swap via the bacterial airlines, which means your everyday goose flying from one continent to another.”
— Howard Bloom, Disinformation: The Interviews: Uncut & Uncensored
Tagged: Bacteria, Connectionism, Data Movement, Transfer
“Nature has been far more clever at connectionism than have we. Her mechanisms for information swapping, data processing, and collective creation are more intricate and agile than anything the finest computer theoreticians have yet foreseen.”
— Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
Tagged: Agile, Connectionism, Evolution, Movement, Nature
“People— once they became metropolitan, once they developed cities, and once they developed a high degree of trade between cities— began to gather together, not on the basis of tribal loyalties, but on the basis of mental loyalties. People who shared a common idea or people who shared a common emotional set could find other people like them in other cities and gather together in international subcultures.”
— Howard Bloom, Disinformation: The Interviews: Uncut & Uncensored
Tagged: Beyond Tribalism, Bonding, Connection, Evolution, Network, Networking, Tribes, Urbanization